Paul Klee and First Grade

For my first graders beginning project we looked at artist Paul Klee, specifically his piece Castle and Sun. We talked about geometric shapes recognizable in the painting and they were quick to move beyond the basic square, circle and triangle to list all the fancy shapes they knew: trapezoid, rhombus etc... After that we reviewed the concept of warm and cool colors.

Onto the project! Students were to pick either a piece of warm colored paper or cool colored paper. They then had to take precut strips of paper from the opposite family. For example if they chose a red background paper(warm) they were to use blue, purple and green (cool) strips to make their castle.

Students cut the strips of paper into shapes and assembled them on the paper, much like working with two dimensional building blocks. It was really fun to see how different they all turned out.

First Post

First I'd like to say welcome to anyone who happens to make it to this little corner of the internet. The concept of writing a blog seemed like a good way to get my ideas out there. . . well mostly it has turned into another not quite competition with my fellow art educator and friend. Both of us are starting up blogs as a way to be more connected with the art education community, plus if one of us didn't do it they would be the loser of this "competition". So since my friend already has three posts on her blog I think it is time for me to post one too. 

I'll start off by showing what my youngest students, Kindergarten, have been working on. To start my Kinders off we talked about Primary Colors. Nothing too in depth, but simply that these are the three colors known as primary and that they help make the other colors. We talked about this while looking at the work of Piet Mondrian for obvious reasons. I also showed this video which they all wanted to watch a hundred times.Ok Go Primary Colors

For the project I had students glue precut black strips of paper onto a white piece. This gave them a little taste of using glue sticks and scissors. After all the students had completed this step I gave each table red, blue and yellow crayons and let them color in the squares and rectangles they had created. I told them it was okay to leave some spaces white.Overall I think the students created some really great pieces.